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from Part I - Form and Genre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2022
This essay explores the novel’s vexed position within the emergent genteel culture of the early United States. It charts a broad transformation in the genre’s status between the 1780s and 1820s as the novel gradually becomes widely, if unevenly, accepted as respectable, even edifying, reading material. In tracing this shift, the essay explores how certain novelists of this period sought to establish the respectability of their own novels in part by distancing their works from the novel genre’s association with aristocratic frivolity. In this, these novels exemplify the early republic’s conflicted attitude toward gentility as such. The essay argues that these novels played an important role in this era’s more general recasting of gentility as bourgeois respectability rather than aristocratic fashionableness. The prevailing social and political conservatism of these novels, however, should not obscure the sustained literary experiment they undertook in reimagining the social meaning of the novel in the early United States.
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